By Robert
Reich
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The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant
fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed
interests. This must change. The election of 2016 has repudiated it.
We need a
people’s party – a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in
opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican party, which is about to take over
all three branches of the U.S. government. We need a New Democratic Party that
will fight against intolerance and widening inequality.
What happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.
At the core of that structure are the political leaders of both
parties, their political operatives, and fundraisers; the major media, centered
in New York and Washington DC; the country’s biggest corporations, their top
executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall
Street banks, their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity
managers, and their lackeys in Washington; and the wealthy individuals who
invest directly in politics.
At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure
proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the
Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had
deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders,
experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any
candidate could possibly want.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The
presidency was won by Donald Trump, who made his fortune marketing office
towers and casinos, and, more recently, starring in a popular
reality-television program, and who has never held elective office or had
anything to do with the Republican party. Hillary Clinton narrowly won the
popular vote, but not enough of the states and their electors secure a victory.
Hillary Clinton’s defeat is all the more remarkable in that her
campaign vastly outspent the Trump campaign on television and radio
advertisements, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Moreover, her campaign had the
support in the general election not of only the kingpins of the Democratic
party but also many leading Republicans, including most of the politically
active denizens of Wall Street and the top executives of America’s largest
corporations, and even former Republican president George HW Bush.
Her campaign
team was run by seasoned professionals who knew the ropes. She had the visible
and forceful backing of Barack Obama, whose popularity has soared in recent
months, and his popular wife. And, of course, she had her husband.
Trump, by contrast, was shunned by the power structure. Mitt
Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, actively worked against
Trump’s nomination. Many senior Republicans refused to endorse him, or even
give him their support. The Republican National Committee did not raise money
for Trump to the extent it had for other Republican candidates for president.
What happened?
There had been hints of the political earthquake to come. Trump
had won the Republican primaries, after all. More tellingly, Clinton had been
challenged in the Democratic primaries by the unlikeliest of candidates – a
74-year-old Jewish senator from Vermont who described himself as a democratic
socialist and who was not even a Democrat.
Bernie Sanders went on to win 22
states and 47% of the vote in those primaries. Sanders’ major theme was that
the country’s political and economic system was rigged in favor of big
corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.
The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an
aberration, and, until recently, didn’t take Trump seriously. A respected
political insider recently told me most Americans were largely content with the
status quo. “The economy is in good shape,” he said. “Most Americans are better
off than they’ve been in years.”
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t
reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming
arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show
the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining
real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than
it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees –
the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic
gains, meanwhile, have gone to top.
These gains have translated into political
power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes,
favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by
anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled
up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know
a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But
over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based
fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on
raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting
votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24
years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But
in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and
economic security.
Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free
trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby
lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the
backbone of the white working class – failing to reform labor laws to impose
meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form
unions with simple up-or-down votes.
Partly as a result, union membership sank
from 22% of all
workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today,
and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s
gains.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to
ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major
industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination –
more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been
to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and
to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump’s
authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to
fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power
structure understandably fears that Trump’s isolationism will stymie economic
growth.
But most Americans couldn’t care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in
the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.
The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016
election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans.
Perhaps it also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean
acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.
ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of
Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at
the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in
the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten
most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written
fourteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The
Work of Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent,
"Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American
Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary,
INEQUALITY FOR ALL.
